Galactic Civilizations III: Intrigue and v3.0 Review

Taxes, The Market, Farming, and Extreme Worlds:

In life, taxes are unavoidable, so it makes sense they would eventually come to GalCiv 3 and their impact is worth considering. Within your Govern screen you can now change the rate at which you tax your civilization, which directly influences your income per turn and morale. Obviously your income is important, but the morale on your planets is more important than ever, because of how it relates to the new government system in Intrigue. High approval is necessary to keep your government under your control, but you do not want to go bankrupt, so balance this carefully. Of course higher morale and approval also leads your worlds to perform better, making the balancing even more interesting. If it sounds more complicated than you want to deal with, play a synthetic civilization, like the Yor. Synthetics are always at maximum approval, so you can have taxes maxed out without issue.

A very, very, very welcome change with Intrigue is the Galactic Market. Access to it does depend on the form of government you have, but it can very much be worth making decisions around it. The Galactic Market is a place you can purchase resources from without needing to trade with other civilizations. It is a market though, so as you purchase more the price goes up, but you can also sell some to decrease value and bring in some funds. The market manipulation potential is not interesting to me, and I do not see how it might be useful either (which might be a me-thing), but the ability to just purchase what you need is wonderful.

To be clear, resources in GalCiv3 are very important because so many things need them to be done, like constructing special buildings, ships, and working with the Citizens added with the Crusade expansion. As the resources are not evenly distributed in the galaxy, you could end up at the mercy of your opponents to acquire them, but with the Galactic Market this is less an issue. Of course you still want to secure a steady supply of resources, which may require some military conquest, but until then you can use the market.

I most felt the positive impact of the market when playing as the Yor, because its synthetic population is manufactured. This means you need resources to make them, and in that game I did not have them within my empire. It also was not cheap, but the ability to purchase and not trade to get them was very welcome and helpful.

Though not dependent on the market, growing the population of non-synthetic civilizations has changed now with the addition of farms. Worlds will not have arable tiles on them, which are the only locations you can build farms on, and you will want to build them eventually. Farms allow the world's population cap to increase and with the additional food population growth will be positively impacted as well. More population means a world's production will also be increased, so it is definitely desirable. It is possible to build over the arable sections with other structures, so watch out and make sure you do not do that, unless you really want to. I am not aware of any way to add arable tiles to a world, and honestly, if it exists I feel it should be mid to late game as a reward for being such an advanced culture.

Another change to the game that is pretty cool and clever in my opinion is how extreme worlds function now. The frequency of these worlds should be greater now, but depending on your civilization choice, they might not impact you. Synthetic civilizations can colonize bacterial, frozen, and barren worlds without any special tech to do so, which is a definite advantage over carbon and silicon-based civs, but remember they also have a disadvantage with how they reproduce, so it balances out. You might be able to take more worlds initially, but you will likely lack the numbers to put them to much use.